Paris: With Pen and Pencil eBook

This was the man who, in the years that followed him,
ruled, as it were, the intellect of Paris and France.
He was a mighty man, and the fact that he was bitterly
persecuted, gave him a hold upon the sympathies of
succeeding generations. The conduct of the church
toward him was shameful, and he made the sad mistake
of rejecting all religion, the true as well as the
false.

His plays and writings abound with shocking sentiments,
and some of his writings are exceedingly coarse.
These scoffs, coming from an ordinary man, would have
wrought little harm; but from the great Voltaire, who
was worshiped by the French people, they possessed
an astonishing power to work iniquity. A New
Englander can scarcely credit his senses in Paris
when he finds the estimation in which Voltaire and
his writings are held by a vast class of the most
intelligent Parisians. In religious America he
is regarded as a monster of iniquity; in France as
a great poet, philosopher, and advocate of human liberty.

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THE GREAT COMIC WRITER.

The place where Moliere, the great comic writer of
France, lived in Paris, was pointed out to me one
day while near the Rue St. Honore; and I have often
noticed on one of the prominent streets a very neat
monument to the memory of the great man. It is
a niche, with two Corinthian columns, surmounted by
a half-circular pediment, which is richly ornamented.
A statue of Moliere is placed in the niche in a sitting
posture, and in a meditative mood. In front of
the columns on each side, there are allegorical figures—­one
representing his serious, the other his comic plays.
Each bears a scroll which contains—­one,
his comic plays, arranged in chronological order;
and the other, his serious plays, arranged in like
manner. The basement is beautifully sculptured.
The inscriptions are as follows: “A.
Moliere. Ne a Paris, le 15 Jauvier, 1622, et
mort a Paris, le 17 Fevrier, 1673.”
The monument is over fifty feet in height, and cost
one hundred and sixty-eight thousand francs.
It was erected in 1844, with a great deal of attendant
ceremony when it was finished.

Moliere is one of the names of which France is justly
proud, and in Paris his memory is half-worshiped.
Not to know him well, would be in the eyes of a Parisian
the sure sign of intolerable stupidity. He was
the greatest comic writer of France, and perhaps of
the world. It will not be out of place, therefore,
to give a slight sketch of his life.

The real name of Moliere was Jean Baptiste Poguelin,
and he was born in a little house in the Rue St. Honore,
in the year 1622. His father was a carpet-furnisher
to the king, and he was brought up to the same business
by his father. His mother died when he was only
ten years old, and his father was left with a large
family of children to educate. The boy passed
his early days in his father’s warehouse, but
his grandfather was accustomed to take him often to
the play-house, where he listened to some of the great
Corneille’s plays, to his thorough delight.
Thus in his youth, even while a mere boy, the taste
for the drama was created. His father at one
time remonstrated with the old man for taking the boy
thus early to the theater, and asked, “Do you
mean to make an actor of him?”